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This is the last couple of minutes from my favorite episode of The Beverly Hillbillies (The Indians Are Coming). It's political incorrectness at its best! Granny learns that a native tribe has a territorial dispute with the Clampett land claim back in Tennessee. She expects the worst and assumes the 'Injuns' will soon be attacking. In order to prevent the Clampetts from going back to Tennessee to fight the Injuns, Mr. Drysdale arranges for some Hollywood stuntmen to simulate an Injun attack on the Clampett home in Beverly Hills! Throughout the episode Granny wishes John Wayne were present to help fight the Injuns. He shows up at the very end in a brief cameo appearance. Tags:BeverlyHillbilliesJohnWayneAdded: 29th June 2008Views: 14144Rating:Posted By:Lava1964

Hal Block was a regular panelist on What's My Line? from 1950 to 1953. He started his career as a joke writer in Chicago and once toured overseas with Bob Hope. He was not well liked by the other WML panelists because of his lack of dignity. Years later Bennett Cerf referred to Block as 'a clod.' WML producer Gil Fates recalled, 'Hal was a strange man. He was rumored to have come from a very wealthy family in Chicago, where he wrote material for some of the standout, stand-up comics in the business. He was stocky with curly black hair, heavy lips, and rather bulging eyes. He wore bow ties, stood around with his hands clasped behind his back, and smiled most of the time. He seemed completely uninhibited by either sensitivity or propriety. He referred to Ethel Barrymore as 'you doll' and planted big wet kisses on both Sister Kenny and Helen Hayes as they passed down the panel to say goodbye. For our deodorant sponsor he gratuitously coined the phrase, 'Make your armpit a charmpit.'
Hal was totally oblivious to the panel's distaste for his jokes or to the icy correctness with which John Daly would greet one of his appalling observations.
'You're the prettiest nun I ever saw,' he once complimented a Dominican Sister in full habit.
'So what was so wrong?' he asked in defense. 'She was a real doll.'
You couldn't teach the meaning of good taste to Hal any more than StarKist could teach it to Charlie the Tuna. Hal's relationship to the show was much like that of the small-town, stay-at-home wife to her rising young corporate executive husband. Hal had served his purpose when the program was young, but now that we were a class product his gaucheries were no longer tolerable.' In March 1953 Block was quietly replaced on the WML panel by the much more urbane Steve Allen. Block died, pretty much forgotten, from injuries he suffered in an apartment fire, in 1981 at age 67. Tags:HalBlockWhatsMyLinepanelistAdded: 17th November 2009Views: 2283Rating:Posted By:Lava1964

Allen Hoskins became part of Hal Roach's Our Gang troupe in 1922 before he was two years old. At first Hoskins' Farina character was androgynous; in some films he's a male, in others he's a female. Farina soon evolved into a fully male character--and one of the most popular of the late silent and early talkies period. Often dressed in a bizarre array of mismatched gaudy clothes, Farina's character was the stereotypical 'pickaninny.' By the time his tenure as Farina on Our Gang ended in 1931, Hoskins was the top-salaried performer, earning $250 per week. Hoskins briefly had a vaudeville act with his sister, but gradually drifted away from show business. 'I prefer jobs where I eat regularly,' he quipped. Hoskins served in WWII, rising to the rank of sergeant. Late in Hoskins' life he worked tirelessly with the disabled and mentally ill. Like his fellow black Our Gang performers, Hoskins was annoyed at the political correctness that caused the series to be heavily edited for TV in the early 1970s. While acknowledging that blacks were steroetyped in the Our Gang comedies, he pointed out that whites were too: There were the stereotypical fat kids, bullies, nerds, freckle-faced kids, and pretty blondes. He was also quick to point out that in an era when much of America was segregated, the racially mixed Our Gang kids played, socialized, and went to school together. Hoskins died of cancer a month before his 60th birthday in 1980. Tags:OurGangFarinaAllenHoskinsAdded: 29th November 2009Views: 2223Rating:Posted By:Lava1964

In 1993, Judith Grad, a kitchen-table Scrabble enthusiast was horrified to discover that the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (OSPD) contained racial, religious, and ethnic slurs along with common vulgarities and obscenities. She wrote letters of complaint to Hasbro (the company that owns Scrabble) and Merriam-Webster, the publisher of OSPD. The general response was that although some words were certainly offensive, they were still words that could be found in any collegiate-level dictionary. Moreover, their meanings were irrelevant to the game. Unsatisfied, Grad contacted the Anti-Defamation League of B'Nai Brith, the NAACP, and the Zionist Organization of America. That, combined with a letter-writing campaign organized by the National Council of Jewish Women, brought the 'offensive word issue' some mainstream publicity. Without consulting Merriam-Webster or the National Scrabble Association (NSA), Hasbro chairman Alan Hassenfeld, in a knee-jerk reaction, announced that '50 to 100 words' would be expunged when the next edition of OSPD was published. Predictably, serious tournament Scrabble players went nuts, accusing Hasbro of caving into censorship, political correctness and the 'language police.' A petition bearing the signatures of more than 800 tournament players was presented to Hasbro demanding Hassenfeld's decision be reversed. At the 1994 U.S. National Scrabble Championship in Los Angeles, an angry mob of more than 200 players vociferously declared their opposition to any expurgation and vowed to quit the game or even sue the NSA if any words were removed from the lists because of political correctness. An acceptable compromise was reached: Starting in 1996 a separate Official Word List (OWL)--without definitions--would be made available to tournament players through the NSA, while a sanitized OSPD would be sold to the general public. OSPD would contain no offensive words and a not-too-prominent disclaimer that it was only 'official' for school and recreational play. Since offensiveness is highly subjective, determining the words that were eventually expunged from OSPD was itself controversial. Brace yourself: Among the 303 'naughty' words you'll no longer see in OSPD are FATSO, LIBBERS, REDSKIN, GRINGO, BAZOOMS, COMSYMP, POONTANG, WETBACK, PAPIST, BADASS, REDNECK, BULLDYKE and STIFFIE. Tags:ScrabblewordscensorshippoliticalcorrectnessAdded: 8th March 2011Views: 2619Rating:Posted By:Lava1964

In 1990 The Benny Hill Show was airing in reruns in 97 countries around the world--but not in Great Britain where it had originated. The scourge of political correctness had forced Thames Television to end its association with Hill in 1989 after 20 successful years. Thames defended the move by saying Hill's periodic specials were becoming too costly, viewership was down, and the 65-year-old Hill was looking tired. However, by the late 1980s it was becoming unfashionable for Hill's sexually charged farcical comedy skits to be shown on British TV. (One anti-Hill crusader wildly blamed The Benny Hill Show for all the sexual assaults in the UK!) Hill did not need the money, but he did miss being on TV. He had open offers to appear in Las Vegas and name his price, but Hill did not want to make the journey overseas. Hill was a true loner who never married and was not known to have had a long-term relationship with anyone. The few friends he had said his dismissal by Thames was akin to handing Hill a death sentence. With assets worth more than 7.5 million British pounds, Hill was a bit of a miser. He never owned a car, he did his own shopping, and he lived in a very modest flat. He was also a slob. His flat was usually filled with dirty dishes, papers strewn everywhere, and dirty clothes on the floor. A friend once asked him why he threw his clothes on the floor. "Because they won't stick to the ceiling!" was his pithy answer. In February 1992, the 68-year-old Hill suffered mild heart attack. He was ordered to go on a diet. Two months later he died of another heart attack while sitting in a favorite chair in front of his television. His body was not discovered for three days. Hill's will had not been updated since 1961. The will's beneficiaries (his parents and his sister) had already died. The comedian's vast fortune was eventually split among nieces and nephews whom Hill had barely known. Among those who considered Benny Hill a comic genius were people as diverse as Charlie Chaplin, Michael Jackson and Walter Cronkite! Tags:BennyHilldeathdeclinecomedyUKAdded: 29th October 2014Views: 1279Rating:Posted By:Lava1964

In the 1961 romantic comedy Breakfast at Tiffany's, Audrey Hepburn played flighty New York City escort Holly Golightly. The relatively small role of her Japanese landlord, Mr. Yunioshi, was strangely played by...Mickey Rooney. Director Blake Edwards instructed Rooney to play Yunioshi as a caricature of an Asian. Accordingly Rooney wore false dentures to give him protruding front teeth. He also spoke in a way that the letter L came out as an R sound. ('Miss Go-right-ry' was how he pronounced the main character's name.) Most of the time Mr. Yunioshi yelled rather than spoke. Based on 21st-century political correctness, Rooney's performance clearly falls within the bounds of bad taste, but as Rooney noted shortly before he died, for the first 40 years after Breakfast at Tiffany's was released, nobody complained. In fact, Rooney claimed that Asian fans of the film always thought his portrayal of Mr. Yunioshi was very amusing. Tags:MickeyRooneyMrYunioshiBreakfastatTiffanysAdded: 20th June 2015Views: 657Rating:Posted By:Lava1964